Transforming the Health System from the Inside Out

The movement toward electronic medical records gains speed with daily reports of another insurer offering enrollees online records, millions of dollars spent on a new electronic system, or new standards for health information technology. As welcome as these developments are, they represent merely stepping stones that are leading to a far more profound and lasting transformation of our health system. Ultimately, an information-enabled system will emerge that is very different from today's document-bound, fragmented delivery system. We are rapidly approaching an era where the size of a health system will be gauged not by the number of buildings on its campus but by its ability to move petabytes of data to the right people at the right time.